There has been a growing concern that the meat industry is increasingly inspecting itself as the federal government appears to provide less and less oversight.
According to AFGE’s National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is not hiring more food inspectors who inspect carcasses on the slaughter line. Instead, the agency is hiring more consumer safety inspectors (CSIs), whose job runs the gamut of inspecting carcasses to testing for microbes like salmonella and misbranding.
CSIs said they can’t focus on food inspection as they have other duties and have to travel to two to five plants in one day. Food inspectors, on the other hand, only work at the plant they’re assigned.
There are about 6,500 food inspectors and CSIs, but the number of food inspectors is falling. National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals Chair Paula Schelling Soldner said she asked them if they are doing away with food inspectors but never got an answer.
“We need more food inspectors to focus on the slaughter line,” said Soldner. “CSIs can’t perform all the duties on an eight-hour day.”
The agency is also cutting overtime. According to the contract, if inspectors work more than 40 hours per week, they get paid overtime, which is paid for by the plants. The meat industry needs these extra work hours, but they also complain they’re paying too much for overtime. The agency then created teams of 4-5 people who could be from different plants to work on the weekend. The slaughterhouses are saving money as inspectors rush from one plant to the next, resulting in minimum inspection. This has been happening across the country since last October.
This is in addition to line speed issues.
During the previous administration, the FSIS increasingly favored deregulation that allowed increased line speeds for all slaughtered species and in turn removed many federal inspectors from the lines. This drastically increased profits for meatpacking companies and drastically decreased safety for inspectors, workers, consumers, and animals.
“In my 37 years, we regulated the industry. Now it’s the industry that regulates how inspection is done,” Soldner added.
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